Conservative host Rush Limbaugh told his listeners Monday that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a staunch enemy to those on the left because of his intellectual acumen and his incisive ability to see through arguments that attempted to undermine the Constitution.
Limbaugh continued about Scalia, who was found dead on Saturday:
Antonin Scalia embodied the absolute worst of a Supreme Court justice as far as Obama and the left are concerned. Of all the so-called conservative justices, Scalia was satanic, because Scalia was formidable. Scalia could not be defeated intellectually. Scalia could not be trumped in any way, shape, manner, or form, other than by votes. But nobody would outanalyze him, nobody would outsmart him because he believed in things the left doesn’t.
They don’t believe in the original intent and finding it. They don’t believe in looking at the text of the Constitution and combining that with original intent. It’s kind of a mistake to say that Scalia was a strict constructionist. He was not. He was a textualist. And here’s the difference, as he explained it. He said a strict constructionist would look at the First Amendment and say it only applied to the written word, ’cause at the time the Constitution was written, that’s all there was. There wasn’t telephone. There wasn’t radio or TV. There was nothing on the air. All there was was spoken and written.
And if you interpret the Constitution as a strict constructionist, as it was constructed with original intent, then you’d have to say that there is no free speech unless something’s written. And he said that’s not at all what they meant. You have to be able to interpret the text, the textual content and so forth. So he considered himself to be an originalist and a textualist — his word. And you have to understand what they meant. And the only way you can understand what they meant was to study them, the founders who wrote it. And what they meant with the First Amendment was that government would not stand in the way of anything anybody said anywhere, anytime, anyhow, except, you know, “fire” in a crowded theater.
Dismissing some theories that President Obama may try to appoint a moderate individual to the high court who would draw the approval of some Senate Republicans, Limbaugh said that President Obama’s objective will be to appoint “as powerful a leftist justice as he can get.”
“I guarantee you they’re salivating,” he said. “Everywhere you could find in the deep, dark crevices of wherever they hang out, they’re salivating at the opportunity they’ve got here. And they are not going to squander it.”
“This is it,” he stressed. “This is where you overturn the Second Amendment, folks. There is where you use the government to get rid of the parts of the Constitution holding you back.”
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